Jasper Fforde

“[from the television show,"Evade the Question Time"]At the end of the first round, I will award three points to Mr. Kaine for an excellent nonspecific condemnation, plus one bonus point for blaming the previous government and another for successfully mutating the question to promote the party line. Mr. van de Poste gets a point for a firm rebuttal, but only two points for his condemnation, as he tried to inject an impartial and intelligent observation.”

“Her areas of expertise are bar codes, book titles and maps - she has an original Parker Brothers map of the world.”

“I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.”

“I think that you could have used your vast intellect far more usefully by serving mankind instead of stealing it. -Mycroft"Where's the fun in that? Goodness is weakness, pleasantness is poisonous, serenity is mediocrity and kindness is for losers. The best reason for committing Loathsome and detestable acts - and let's face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field - is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by almost anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good." -Acheron”

“You nearly killed eight people!" I managed to gasp out loud."My count was closer to twelve," returned Havisham as she opened the door. "And anyhow, you can't nearly kill someone. Either they are dead or they are not.”

“The name is Schitt," he replied. "Jack Schitt.”

“Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.”

“Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.”

“A missing arm might ruin your symmetry. Personal asymmetry where I come from is a big taboo and brings great shame on the family and sometimes even the whole village.""Do you then have to kill yourself over it or something?""Goodness me, no! The family and village just have to learn to be ashamed--and nuts to them for being so oversensitive.”

“Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'.”

“What's with the "iMagic" name change?' I said without preamble.'Industrial Magic was a bit of a mouthful,' he explained. 'Besides, putting an "i"in front of anything makes it more hip and current.”

“Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.”

“If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.”

“To espresso or to latte, that is the question...whether 'tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain...or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one's heartache...”

“Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one's person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred - shockingly - with the handle of a fork.”

“Were you listening to a word I said?' 'I kind of switched off when you drew breath.”

“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”

“Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.”

“Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.”

“The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.”

“My temper began to rise -- always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.”

“That's the big difference between [the BookWorld] and [the RealWorld]," said Plum. "When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward."I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. "Nope, I said finally, "you've got me on that one.""It confuses me, too," admitted Plum, "but that's the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives, and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”

“« -...sono andato nella Londra del 1610 e ho scoperto che Shakespeare era solo un attore con un secondo lavoro potenzialmente imbarazzante come ricettatore a Stratford. Nulla di strano che lo tenesse nascosto - lo farebbe chiunque.-Chi li ha scritti allora? Bacon? Marlowe?-No, è insorto un problemino. Vedi, nessuno ha mai sentito parlare di quelle opere, figuriamoci averle scritte.Non capivo.-Cosa vuoi dire? Non ci sono?-Proprio così. Non esistono. Non sono mai state scritte. Né da lui, né da altri.-Scusate- si intromise Landen, che ne aveva abbastanza -ma abbiamo visto il Riccardo III sei settimane fa.-Certo- disse mio padre -Il tempo è scardinato alla grande. Naturalmente bisognava intervenire. Ho portato con me una copia delle opere complete e le ho date all'attore Shakespeare nel 1592 perché le distribuisse secondo uno schema preciso. Questo soddisfa la tua domanda? »”

“Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.”

“Almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon.”

“...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”

“...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.”

“Don't move," said Sprockett."Mimes don't generally attack unless they are threatened.”

“Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.”

“[I]appreciate a woman who knows when she's being coerced”

“Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.”

“No te creas a quien te diga que el futuro ya está escrito. Lo mas que puede hacer un profeta es ofrecerte la versión más probable de los futuros acontecimientos, pero depende de nosotros aceptar el futuro tal y como es, o cambiarlo. Es fácil dejarse llevar por la corriente, pues para nadar en contra hay que ser muy valiente.”

“Las premoniciones se cumplen porque la gente quiere que se cumplan. Un observador siempre cambia el resultadi de un acontecimiento; millines de observadores, como en este caso, lo garantizan.”

“Eso es lo malo de las premoniciines, que tienen la molesta costumbre de hacerse realidad.”

“-Pero Mu'shad Waseed,aunque es muy buen mago, no tiene en todo el cuerpo ni una centésima parte del poder que yo tengo en el dedo meñique del pie.-¡Os he oído! -le dijo Mu'shad Waseed (...)-. ¡Enseñadme ese meñique vuestro tan poderoso!Pero en lugar de mostrarle a Mu'shad Waseed el dedo del pie, lo que hizo el Poderoso Shandar fue inclinarse ante él, tanto que incluso rozó el suelo con la frente, y decirle, con voz cargada de respeto y veneración:-Bienvenido a mi humilde palacio, muy honorable Mago del Imperio Persa, señor de los vientos y de las mareas, conocido en sus dominios como El que es capaz de aplacar a Tamsin.-¿No querrá usted decir jamsin? ¿Ese viento seco y cálido que sopla habitualmente en la Península Arábiga?-Si hubiera querido decir jamsin, hubiera dicho jamsin. Tamsin era la segunda esposa de Mu'shad Waseed. Una mujer espantosa, espantosa de verdad. Su amor por las cosas brillantes y la ropa cara, y su costumbre de bañarse en leche de coneja, hicieron retroceder e feminismo por lo menos cuatro siglos.”

“-Les presento al nuevo expósito, Tiger Prawns. Tiger te presento a las hermanas Karamázov. Deirdre y Deirdre.-¿Por qué se llaman igual? -Tenían un padre con muy poca imaginación.”

“Bienvenido a Kazam (...), donde los horrores más inimaginables comparten el día a día con la perplejidad absoluta y el azar más rabioso. Definirlo como manicomio sería un insulto hasta para el más desquiciado de los manicomios.”

“Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then — and this is the important bit — do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.”

“You many have noticed I have a temper ... but when I calmed down, I realized that this world, blighted and imperfect as it is, would be better with you in it.”

“She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.”

“I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.”

“I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.”

“Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.”

“Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”

“If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this.”

“We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired.”

“Maybe those sorts of yes-or-no life-and-death decisions are easier to make because they are so black and white. I can cope with them because it's easier. Human emotions, well. . .they're just a fathomless collection of grays and I don't do so well on the midtones.”

“What is there to forgive?. . .Ignore forgive and concentrate on living. Life for you is short; far too short to allow small jealousies to infringe on the happiness which can be yours only for the briefest of times.”

“Without a yardstick sometimes the high points can be taken for granted.”

“The cleanest souls are the easiest to soil.”